Repeating Decimal
by FancyFreeThinker101
Summary: Maybe it's not love, but it's not just idolizing—it's some fumbling fraction in between, some obscure, repeating decimal between one and two. ONESHOT. HPxGW. M for language.


You're eleven years old, and you've already committed a capital sin.

You don't know which one it is yet, but you know it's there, and you know you've done it, just as surely as you know it's going to get you in trouble.

Maybe it's lust—you're not sure what it means yet, you only know its linked with the color red, and kissing, and the look Mum gives Dad when it's late at night and she thinks you're not looking. You know you're too young for lust, if that's what it is, but you don't care—he's worth it.

Maybe it's coveting. That one you know better—wanting something you can't have. Only before now you linked it with shiny brooms and the tarts Mum put away for later and money, money, money, because money in your family is something everyone wants but no one can have. Now, if you covet, you covet _him_, and you know its coveting and not simply wanting from the look on Ron's face when he talks about him, the glazed look that tells you he's worlds above you.

You're too young to covet too, but you don't care—he's bloody worth it.

Maybe it's greed. Not for money, but for him—always, always for him. It might be greed, it probably is greed, just like it's probably lust and it's probably coveting, but still you don't care—he's worth it.

Because he's Harry bloody Potter, and he just smiled at you on the way to the kitchen.

You're 14 now, and you're still committing some deadly sin—only now you understand them better. You know it's a funny mixture of all three of them now, just as you know that your capital transgressions at eleven fail to compare to what they are now. They're stronger now—sharper. It's not just hero worship anymore, and dancing around telling the whole damn world you were gonna marry Harry Potter. Maybe it's not love, but it's not just idolizing—it's some fumbling fraction in between, some obscure, repeating decimal between one and two.

1.2345677

1.56783456

1.343434343434

That's what is, this feeling. That's how you choose to define it. It's 1.343434343434.

And sometimes, when you're alone in your room, you smile a hard smile at the thought of the way that Harry Potter, the hero, the Boy Who Lived_, the boy who couldn't do wrong if you fucking wrote him directions how, _has corrupted you, without speaking to you, without looking at you, without stroking your face with his thumb or pulling you down onto his dorm bed and ravaging you like there's no sodding tomorrow.

(No one ever said a girl couldn't have a few idle day-dreams.)

He's good, down to his most basic atomic structure, yet he's taught you how to be bad.

He walked down the halls at school, rumpled and untucked and laughing uncomfortably at some off-color joke from Seamus Finnigan, and he taught you how to lust.

He's good, and noble, and _such a damned hero_ who won't ever take his fair share, or even miss it, but dammit, he taught you how to covet.

You saw him kissing that _bloody tart_ Cho Chang who was never half good enough for him, and wasn't good for anything but ogles and tears, and he taught you how to hate.

He's destroying you inside out, and he doesn't even see it, and you get angry and chuck your books on the ground because he's not watching you, because his eyes aren't on you when you walk in and because he's not walking into your dorm right now, wondering if you're alright.

You kick the bed and think viciously to yourself that someone so damn fucking _perfect_ as Harry Potter ought to at least _notice _when he's ripping someone's damn _life_ to pieces of fluttering pieces of tear-stained parchment-which was an essay for Transfiguration but is now just a load of rubbish. You think to yourself, while some other boy kisses you on the neck and touches your hair with his greasy teenage fingers, that even if you haven't gotten huge breasts and gorgeous legs like you used to hope you would, he could at least bloody _look at you_. Boys like conquest, they like thrill, they like to chase, to supplant. Boys like to _win_. You thought, you hoped, in the very back of your mind, after you burned the journal where you wrote about how gorgeous he was, that maybe if you made yourself seem desirable, he'd catch on, and want you like the rest.

You reckoned it would be a simple case of animal magnetism.

But he still. Doesn't. Even. Glance.

He's funny, and he's sweet, and he talks to you when he sees you in the hall, or when the two of you are alone in a room, but he never lets the guard down. He never lets you see the _human_ in him, in Harry Potter, the Chosen One. You want to push him down sometimes, to sit him in a chair and _force_ him to be human. To be normal, to have faults. You want to make him break, and let the dam fall, and watch the water rush out. You want to teach him how to be just as awful and bad as he made you—but you want to do it deliberately, and you want to watch it happen.

Love—or rather, 1.3434343434—has made a sadist out of you.

You're fifteen, and you're stunned.

He's kissing you—oh, God help you, he's kissing you. And he's not doing it by halves, either—he's not being good, heroic, stupid, stubborn Harry Potter anymore, not right now. He's got one hand on your back and the other is by your butt and he's damn close to touching it, and your hands are grabbing at his hair, and oh, God, he tastes like heroism and cinnamon and not anything like you thought he would—and you can feel his glasses pressing, hard and cold against your cheek, your face, as you grab at him, and he tugs you into him as hard as he can.

Bloody hell, he's doing it in front of your brother.

But you don't care, you don't care, you just don't fucking care, and maybe you never will. He burned you, and destroyed you, and taught you envy and hate, but you want him, you want the good in him to rub off on you. You hope, you've been hoping, that maybe he's made a phoenix out of you— burning, exploding, incinerating so that you can be different, so that you can be better. You tell yourself that's why you want him, that's why you're touching him so desperately—you want to be transformed.

But, deep down, a part of you knows that that's not why.

You want him because he's Harry Freaking Potter, and he smiled at you in the halls when you thought you were killing people.

You want him because he made the world burst into cool green flames whenever he looked at you.

You want him because you hated him fiercely that night when you saw him with Cho.

You want him because he was, he is, the basis of your lust, of your greed, of your shameless, teenage coveting—and yet he also makes you love, and he makes you hope, that someday he'll be all, all yours and you won't be such a _mess_ and things will make sense and that maybe by then you'll be a sweet, even, rounded two, instead of a jagged 1.3434343434.

You want him because you want him, because you've always wanted him, and old habits die hard.


End file.
